I personally wouldn't want them to stop to give me a change log that more than likely will change by the time they are done anyway due to a possible interoperability thing or something that they try that ends up having a bug they don't see right away and then they have to field the gazillion messages about how "You said"..

Lots of new love for the GSM users in this release. This build took a few days longer than we expected since we wanted to address a lot of your bugs/requests, and we also discovered several naughty things that Samsung was doing. TrevE has some rather important info about all that in the next post below which YOU MUST READ.

Long time followers of Synergy will know that we always go one level deeper in the types of mods we cook into our ROMs. And many of you know that we've always been against unauthorized user logging in phones. In fact it was our own TrevE who was behind the CarrierIQ scandal last year in which we caught CIQ and carriers logging everything from keypresses to reading your text messages to screenlogging. Jerks.

Well Samsung isn't quite in the clear either, we've discovered. Their root checking service is doing some shady things that TrevE will detail in the post below. The good news is we've bypassed all of Samsung's root checking services in this build. It also turns out that Samsung's cheating in benchmarks by intentionally optimizing databases used only by benchmark apps. So we hijacked their code to apply to all DBs making SynergyROM faster than ever. Also, we've created a new option in AROMA to bypass the setup screen...

When you choose this option please be advised that the setup screen will still load for 15-20 seconds while the phone sets its initial props. Once this process is completed the setup screen will close itself

...This option will also spoof provisioning on your phone so that your carrier does not detect an excessive amount of provisioning. Once again, please read TrevE's post below for important info regarding this option.

We've also added new options to the AROMA installer, EFS backup for all users, FC fixes, new options to the date/time menu courtesy of Didact74 who took the time to mod them for Synergy himself. He's quickly becoming one of the S3's best smali devs. We've also got lots of fixes for the GSM guys, including proper CSC settings and wifi fixes, and finally an updated Ziggy kernel.

And yes, we even took the extra time to add an option to turn on lockscreen rotation in AROMA. Default is no lockscreen rotation.

Changelog:

r291-326 Samsung root loggers bypassed at the radio level. All DBs optimized for wicked fast performance. New options in AROMA, including an option to bypass setup screen and phone provisioning. APN, FC and wifi fixes for all carriers. New date/time toggles, courtesy of Didact74 (as mentioned above). EFS backup available for all carriers to prevent and fix any future IMEI loss from any ROM. Other AROMA options and bug fixes. No more lockscreen rotation unless you request it in AROMA. And finally a new Ziggy kernel.

Lots of new fixes/goodies this build. Esc has full changelog above, but the big change ill talk about today is Synergy's new Setup Wizard & Activation/Provisioning Bypass. This option when selected in aroma fakes values making android think setup and activation were completed but really skips them all. This is different than the 4 tap bypass as we also fake the provisioning values to make the device think everything ran. To better explain why this is useful, lets look at the average Joe Schmo Android User.

Joe Walks into VZW store, buys a brand new pretty GS3 phone so he can use the interwebs.

Store Associate adds device ids to network, turns on phone, skips setupwizard usually and goes to the settings menu, checks the device got automatically provisioned and all that good stuff.

Joe sets up his phone. Uses it for 10 years. During that time he might get an OTA update or two. On maybe one or two rare instances in the entire phone usage something breaks he will call tech support who will help him factory reset.

Now lets look at an XDA user:

Walks into VZW store, tells the employee to shut up and give them a phone

Goes home and logs onto XDA, roots device

Continues to wipe data, weekly? daily? hourly? and flash every zip file known to man

Lets start back at step 2 in Joe Schmo's scenario. What actually goes on in this short period of time is important for us at least. The device boots a factory image not knowing who's going to buy it, it only has hardware keys and a carrier specific image programmed. It doesn't know your phone number or any other information until its told to care about it. That step where everything gets programmed is actually happening in the background during SetupWizard on first device boot. It calls home and says hey I'm alive now set me up, then the EFS gets programmed with new values. This is its own special code path meant really for new devices, its not exactly the same as say changing sim or updating profiles. Many other things are written to EFS in this stage as well such as CSC values and other initial setup information.

Now back to the average XDA user. Think of how many times we have gone through Setupwizard & this initial device activation. I'd imagine our Carriers could easily make a XDA vs Standard user graph from network data based on this process alone. Is this whole step even really needed? *Probably* not. The reason I say probably is because to the best of my knowledge, this has never been done before. To me it seems like a lot of unnecessary writing to EFS when an update is just not needed. In theory if your on generally the same system image I could see it working as all profile information is stored in partitions rom devs don't modify. As far as what happens after switching RIL/Radios/ROMs daily for 3 months and not activating, we just don't know. There may even be other scenarios we are not even considering yet, but with a limited sample size of a few testers things are going good so far. We fake everything and disable setup wizard using close to stock functionality so it is possible for the system to kick it back on if its really needed - you will just randomly see the SetupWizard screen again. Please report in if that happens.

While were on the subject mass reactivating and EFS updates - Has anyone ever tripped the IMEI reset by only doing a nandroid back to existing rom? Or has it always been wipe data, hit Setup Wizard, boot rom, check imei, gone. I ask because 2 layers of settings are applied at SetupWizard, CSCs and Network Profile information, both of which are written out to EFS. I know its a bit hard to test, but it would be interesting to know if anyone can hit it with Synergy's new Activation Bypass method.

=======

Onto my first rant of the build. Samsung is "cheating" on certain benchmarks apps. Quadrant Standard, Professional & Advanced, RedLicense/RLabs Sqlite Benchmark, and some unknown package (com.samsung.spe.sqlitechecker) have different SQLite PRAGMA options changing journaling and sync options in framework. Samsung gets a wag of the finger from me on this one. These apps in general can not be considered accurate while testing on any version of the the gs3 or the note2.

As for the second rant, We found several more "backup" instances of SysScope's root detection processes- these have all been fully patched in this build. It is pretty interesting how persistent Samsung was in making sure this service could run, although its not exactly clear _why_ You can see one of the many secondary sysscope menus by running the below commands in a shell. Not Scanned is a failure along with true, false is a success. We are not exactly sure the purpose of all these secondary services (there are more than 4 spread across rom, some of which were sending special AT commands to radio) but they are all gonezo now.

Besides sysscope, CSCs appear to be capable of scanning /system/app/ and /system/media/ringtones and comparing it to the lists in system of what should be there. A list seems to be created of additional items and sent off as some kind of special RIL Command if a CSCCompare is called. We also made sure that doesnt happen anymore we always want our users to look as stock as possible (to the network)

TL;DR Here it is, new build. With these new options if I were buying a device today I would get it -> activate once on stock rom -> root -> imei backup original efs and save forever -> wipe -> dodge activation/setup as much as possible. I think this will help our users from all carriers not hit some of the issues we have been seeing, but only time will tell. As always though report in and let us know, ill be lurking

Is there anyway to remap the left soft key to be back instead of menu? I don't mind if any other functionality is changed, but it's a lot easier to hit the left softkey with my thumb on my left hand (I'm left handed), my current way of swapping system/usr/keylayout/sec_touchkey.kl BACK and MENU doesn't work on the recent builds (currently running r74)

Is there anyway to remap the left soft key to be back instead of menu? I don't mind if any other functionality is changed, but it's a lot easier to hit the left softkey with my thumb on my left hand (I'm left handed), my current way of swapping system/usr/keylayout/sec_touchkey.kl BACK and MENU doesn't work on the recent builds (currently running r74)

XDA Developers was founded by developers, for developers. It is now a valuable resource for people who want to make the most of their mobile devices, from customizing the look and feel to adding new functionality.Are you a developer?